Newspapers in India share their thoughts more by show than by tell. If you do want to know quickly, clearly what a newspaper thinks, the unsigned editorials on the left-hand of the opinion page provide the paper’s views on specific issues. These opinions, both unsigned editorials and ‘signed’ articles that go with their authors’ names, serve two purposes: one, to provide people decent material to talk about in dinner parties and Sunday luncheons, making them come across as informed and suitably opinionated. You’ll be surprised how many people don’t really have opinions – until they know what other people’s opinions are from TV and, for the more discerning type, newspapers.
The other purpose of the unsigned editorial or ‘leader’ is the newspaper coming across as having opinions of its own – a brain, if you will. But it’s been newspaper SOP here not to wear its thoughts too much on its sleeve. This makes ample sense. For one, the media is, as the term underlines, a mediator, between readers and the world. Like the referee in a football match, its job isn’t to play, but to control play, making a listenable tune out of the utter noise out there.
Nothing makes for putting one’s views across more strongly among the Herd Collective than political views. Opinions on food, movies, music, etc are too atomised to throw up one grand common subject up for opinionating. The teetotaler won’t have any interest in whether a Pinot Noir is more suitable for Indian summers than a Bourdeaux, and a gin drinker won’t really care about the big fight between Bushmills and Jameson among Irish whiskey aficionados. But politics, especially election politics is simple, elemental, and the stuff that Nestle would have sold in yellow packets if the media industry hadn’t latched on it much earlier.
But the Indian newspaper’s role as mirror to the world, not mounted head on the wall, is most visible while keeping out of this ‘tell-not-show’ opinions strategy. Newspapers show their thoughts on political matters, indirectly, by the way they share political news and (other people’s) opinions. Something readers, of all political dispensations, not only find acceptable, but downright comfortable here.
Which is not the case in the US, Britain and some other democracies. On Friday, the proverbial faeces hit the fan when the venerable Washington Post announced that it would not endorse either US presidential candidate, the first time WaPo said ‘pass’ in 36 years. By Saturday, more than 2,000 readers had already cancelled their subscriptions in horror that the traditionally Democrat-endorsing newspaper – on the instructions of owner Jeff Bezos – refused to hitch its wagon to Kamala Harris. Many readers cried ‘Spineless!’ with big-ticket readers like Salman Rushdie and Stephen King announcing they’re junking their WaPo subscription in disgust. Earlier the same week, Los Angeles Times faced the same Democrat-readers’ blowback when the biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong-owned paper ‘non-endorsed’. All biases and/or establishment-fishing notwithstanding, newspapers openly endorsing a prime ministerial candidate is unthinkable in India. In the US, media endorsement in presidential elections is the norm. Most papers this year are pushing for Harris, with only a handful like The Washington Times, New York Post and Las Vegas Review-Journal endorsing Don Trump. What we think to be non-endorsement ‘neutrality’ here in India is considered spineless haaram there. And that’s because it’s breach of tradition there, while it’s tradition here. A newspaper endorsing a candidate here is dodgy strategy for the cynic-realist. Putting all eggs in a RaGa or a NaMo basket makes little sense for a mainstream readership that isn’t as ‘party-bound’ in its newspaper-consumption as it’s in the US or Britain. On top of it, a newspaper endorsing a candidate is seen as bad form in India – like asking a woman her age or salary.
Here, the ‘fun’ is in guessing the newspaper’s thoughts on the matter without the newspaper overtly giving it away. And one easy, perfectly honourable – ‘shocking’, ‘spineless’ for the American (Democrat?) paper reader – method to do this is for a newspaper to hold no position. Being thoughtless, you might say.
